I'm a WordPress novice trying to help a friend (who is even more of a WordPress novice) with his WordPress blog hosted on GoDaddy.

It was working fine until he apparently (he doesn't fully remember) was prompted to upgrade the software.

Now the blog still works for end-users (you can see it here) but whenever you log into the WordPress admin, you get a Page Not Found / "This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it?" page. The URL that the browser has been redirected to is: http://brewstersmith.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php?_wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2F

It seems like the upgrade attempt was messed up somehow. Given I don't know what precisely caused this, what steps should I take to start investigating the problem and ideally rolling back the upgrade (or completing it) so that the blog is usable again?

Let us know if either of these answers helped you out -- Thanks!
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FlashingCursorAug 24 '12 at 0:28

@FlashingCursor -- definitely will come back and let you guys know. +1 to both answers so far for the tips. Problem persists even when I rename the theme directory. Removing .htaccess doesn't do it either. Will try re-uploading WordPress files as Jake suggests asap.
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Ghopper21Aug 24 '12 at 1:39

1

That's exactly what I'd do. The plugins rename would be the one I try after re-uping all the files except wp-content.
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FlashingCursorAug 24 '12 at 3:22

I've seen this happen before -- Jake makes one good suggestion and I've had to do just that to resolve the issue in several cases.

Another potential fix is to temporarily rename your /wp-content/themes folder (to something like themes.bak) and try to navigate directly to /wp-admin -- there is a chance that a customization to the theme is causing an incomplete upgrade / blocking a database upgrade.

If this resolves your issue, change the directory name back to themes and see if the problem persists.

If changing the themes folder name doesn't resolve your issue, the next step would be to rename the /wp-content/plugins folder and then try /wp-admin again. If this fixes your issue, you'll have change your plugins folder name back to plugins, then update and re-enable each plugin.

* Please make sure you have a full backup of your database before starting this process. You can pull one from the godaddy admin panel under the MySQL options.

Although I'm not a big fan of godaddy, it's not necessarily a godaddy problem. Happened to me on sites hosted at godaddy and Bluehost. If you are getting the yoursite.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php?_wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2F error, this worked for me:

Navigate via FTP to your installation. Check to see if the
upgrade.php file is there.

If not, download Wordpress 3.4.2 from
www.wordpress.org.

Unzip the download and navigate to the wp-admin
folder.

Locate the upgrade.php file and FTP it to your
installation /wp-admin folder

Somehow the in-app update process download was corrupted and missed the required upgrade.php which the redirect points to after the update. Good luck!

I ran a patch in GoDaddy found in the WP application section of my GoDaddy hosting manager. Turns out when I upgraded a plugin, the upgrade.php file was completely deleted from the WP-Admin folder. I just downloaded a fresh copy of WP 3.4.2. I uploaded ONLY the missing upgrade.php file (I still had the upgrade-functions.php file) in my WP-Admin folder. Tried to login, had me run a two second database upgrade and poof, I am back up and running. Hope this helps anyone that didn't find a solution!

I got the same error message. It appears the upgrade didn't complete itself.

I downloaded the latest version of wordpress and uploaded everything EXCEPT the content folder through my ftp program, as suggested earlier. When I went back into my admin panel I was prompted to upgrade the database, and magic, everything was fixed.